freehub Tag

This one killed me at first. I broke the retaining clip that holds the pawls of my Fulcrum Racing 7 freehub. It would sometimes take me a full revolution of more to get the pawls to extend enough via centrifugal force to engage and move me forward.

I bounced from local bike shop to bike shop trying to find a replacement part that wouldn’t take one to two weeks to arrive. After identifying the two shops of a dozen or so in my area that actually sold Fulcrum, only one had a clip that was “only for Fulcrum Racing 1, 2 or 3” according to the guy in the shop. Things didn’t look promising for me.

But then I decided to go poke around the Fulcrum website. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that they had complete parts lists there, along with the catalogs and user manuals (user manuals for wheelsets??)

Well, much to my surprise – and quite despite what the one guy that had a clip in stock told me – all of the wheelsets had the same part number. There it was – good ol’ 5-R1-015. Didn’t matter what wheel. Didn’t matter if the hub was Campy or SRAM/Shimano. It was the same part number. Happy days!

Unfortunately when I found this out it was too late to drive back to the shop that had the clip. Besides, it was about 30 miles or so away and I didn’t really want to make the trip.

On the advice of others, I tried a shop in Sacramento that I’d never been to before – Ikon Cycles (also on Facebook). The guy was quite helpful. He also didn’t have on in stick (D’oh!) but… he said he would call his supplier and call me back. Sure enough, 30 minutes later he called me back. His news – he’d have one for me the very next day. Sure as hell beats the 7-14 days the other shops were talking about.

I understand that shops can have difficulties getting specific parts from suppliers. But the guy at Ikon was super helpful and seemed to know what he was talking about. And he didn’t even blink about taking the time to order a part that retailed for less than 5 dollars. Awesome customer service. I definitely know where I’ll be calling first for parts from now on.